#443

It's been brewing for a few days...Last week, after too many hours on the computer in a desperate bid to fall asleep, I stumbled upon A Charmed Wife, written by one of my college contemporaries. (While I recognize the name, I did not know her personally.) In the middle of my envy for how witty and cool she seemed, there was also an admiration for how witty and cool she seemed, and a recognition of a type of person I have not encountered much since my graduation way back in the halcyon days of 2002. Without intention of elitism, those of you who attended said college might understand what I mean about the insta-recognition thing. What niggled me most were the wonderful quotations from highly important people she peppered her entries with. Including the MLK quote I have now co-opted for my "About Me" page, a sentiment I believe in with every fiber of my being, even if I have a supremely shallow and self-involved blog. (I am three months away from an MD, after all):

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'"

-MLK, Jr.

And the buzzing feeling I had (anxiety? wariness? nerves?) grew stronger as I searched fruitlessly last night for a pithy quote about marriage. I used to be a person who remembered quotes, had some form of elegant wisdom at the ready, always dispensed by a mind more intelligent than my own. Indeed, I started a "Nothing Book" of quotations when I was 12 years old, and dutifully recorded new ones until I stopped 4 years ago.

And the larger question became, when did I stop reading? I've become so all-consumed by randomized control trials and wedding blogs that I've deceived myself into thinking that I'm actually reading. But I miss the grandiosity of novels, the peeks into alternate universes and ways of looking at things. How valuable it is to read, to experience another physician's sentiments toward the profession in this week's JAMA's "A Piece of My Mind." To learn a new approach to a problem in the ways a journalist has structured their article. To spend time as a liberal arts undergraduate again with a teacher whose job was to get you to analyze the whole of human experience, bigger than the patterns found in paper lab values or the rhythm of isolated heart beats.

But how does one choose reading material? Sometimes I think I'll base it on what would make good cocktail party conversation (all with an admittedly liberal slant): The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and biographies of dead presidents and explorers. Sometimes I base it on what a good doctor should read: Pediatrics, Pediatrics in Review, the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Lancet. But how does one find the time? I've met people who make the New England Journal their web browser homepage and I've learned that the healthiest 94 year olds keep to a schedule. But how does one keep a schedule when chaos is their middle name? (Okay, I kid, it is not, but it should be.)

So I ask, Dear Reader: what do you read? How do you choose? And how do you find the time?